Emergent Research

EMERGENT RESEARCH is focused on better understanding the small business sector of the US and global economy.

Authors

The authors are Steve King and Carolyn Ockels. Steve and Carolyn are partners at Emergent Research and Senior Fellows at the Society for New Communications Research. Carolyn is leading the coworking study and Steve is a member of the project team.

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Disclosure Policy

Emergent Research works with corporate, government and non-profit clients. When we reference organizations that have provided us funding in the last year we will note it.
If we mention a product or service that we received for free or other considerations, we will note it.

“There has been a great deal of speculation about the impact of social networking site use on people’s social lives, and much of it has centered on the possibility that these sites are hurting users’ relationships and pushing them away from participating in the world,” ..... “We’ve found the exact opposite—that people who use sites like Facebook actually have more close relationships and are more likely to be involved in civic and political activities.”

The study the article references found that Facebook users:

Are more trusting of others

Have more close relationships

Get more social support

Are more politically engaged

Interesting stuff. It also fits nicely with some of the work we've been doing that shows online networks are leading to more local interaction.

June 30, 2011

We've posted in the past on the growing trend of small businesses replacing traditional websites with Facebook. We get a lot feedback telling us this isn't happening and isn't going to happen, but we keep seeing more and more examples.

And because we keep seeing new examples, we continue to think that over the the next 5 years Facebook is going to become the primary web presence for roughly half of all small businesses that are online.

This does not mean all of these firms will get rid of their traditional websites. It means Facebook will increasingly be the primary online place will interact with their stakeholders, and their traditional website - if they keep it - will be of secondary importance.

"58 percent of Twitter users said they’re likely to follow businesses that answer their questions on Twitter, and 64 percent said they’d be more likely to make a purchase from a company from which they’ve received an answer to a tweeted query."

The research shows Twitter users like to ask questions, and when they ask companies questions they like to get answers. This pretty clearly illustrates the power of Twitter as a customer support channel.

It will come as no surprise that InboxQ provides a service that "delivers a realtime stream of questions related to your business, products, industry or general interests from Twitter directly to your browser."

Because of our blog, we get sent a lot of surveys to review. To be honest, most are poorly done. But the big problem is not survey methodology, it's how the results are presented. Often the marketing hype and spin of the survey data leads to claims that clearly aren't supportable based on the survey methodology, data and results.

InboxQ&A did not do this. They clearly explained their methodology and results in a ScribD document. It was a non-scientific online survey, which I think is fine given their goals, objectives and market. They don't hype their results and don't make unsubstantiated claims.

Because of this, I would certainly consider becoming a customer of theirs.

Not surprisingly, if you use social media to find survey respondents you end up with a large percentage of respondents that use and like social media. Because of this, the survey mostly reflects the usage and attitudes of small businesses that use social media - a subset of the overall small business sector.

The Citibank survey was done using a random sample and by phone. A random sample draws their respondents to reflect the overall population being studied. In this case it means including small businesses that don't use social media and even small businesses that are only marginally online, or not online at all.

Because of the methods used, the Citibank survey is much more likely to accurately reflect social media usage and attitudes of the small business segment in general. The results from the Citibank survey are also consistent with other random sample surveys on social media usage by small business.

This does not mean surveys that don't use random samples are bad. The 2011 Social Media Marketing survey does an excellent job of meeting their goal of informing us how marketers are using social media. I found the report to be insightful and full of useful information. But it's not a good source on social media usage rates or attitudes for the entire small business sector due to how the sampling was done.

The lesson for users of surveys is to understand the survey methods used to collect and analyze the data. If you don't, you can easily end up drawing the wrong conclusions.

We're not. We're strong supporters and active Twitter users. But we like to think we have a balanced view of Twitter, which is it's useful for some businesses/applications and not useful for others.

A recent article from The Street - No Need for Jitters Over Twitter - nicely illustrates the balanced view (disclosure: I'm quoted in the article). Key quote (not from me):

"In other words, Twitter is simply another potential business tool -- not a magic bullet that will bring customers to your door."

Just as small businesses should not be swayed by the hype around Twitter, they also shouldn't be swayed by the backlash. Twitter is a hugely successful company and for the right applications and businesses a great business tool.

Our Twitter advice to small businesses remains the same. Learn about Twitter and experiment with it. Test it for a mix of business purposes, measure your results and use it if you're getting a strong return on investment relative to other uses of your time and money.

April 08, 2011

The full impact of the Internet's power to identify and aggregate demand is only starting to be understood. Social shopping isn't just changing ecommerce, but commerce in general.

A great example comes from one of my favorite iPhone Apps, GolfLogix. This App turns my iPhone into a golf range finder and electronic scorecard.

The range finder gives me GPS distances to hazards, the green and the pin. They have thousands of courses in their database, and I've found it to be accurate - or at least more accurate than my game requires.

GolfLogix is $40 per year, which is a lot for an iPhone app. But golfers (even mediocre golfers like me) are pretty price insensitive and willing to try new equipment that might help us play better.

Which is why I think their new Groupon-like service is going to be a hit. I just got an email from them that said:

"Starting this month, all GolfLogix members will receive a special offer email every Thursday with an exceptional, exclusive, limited-time deal on a golf product or service. Right now we are reaching out to various golf manufacturers and finalizing deals that will not be available anywhere else. You will be amazed at what we are finding!"

GolfLogix adding social shopping is a good example of the stunning number of Groupon-like imitators that are springing up. We think the new entrants that serve vertical or niche markets are most likely to be successful, especially if like GolfLogix they have an existing user base.

April 01, 2011

For those not familiar with ECSB, it's a research and marketing firm that helps big companies market to small businesses and small business owners. It used to be called Warrillow, but their name changed when they were acquired by the Corporate Executive Board several years ago.

The founder, John Warrillow, now lives with his family in Aix-en- Provence in France. He no doubt spent some of the money he made selling his business getting a room with a view. John is about to release a new version of his book Built to Sell, which we will review later this month.

But I digress.

The blog post I found most interesting shows that Facebook is the preferred social media network small businesses want their suppliers to use to communicate with them.

The chart below is from the ECSB blog post on this topic and based on a January survey.

On which of the following social media networks would you want suppliers to actively participate in (e.g., communicating directly with you)?

March 17, 2011

When asked how social media usage is impacting their spending plans on their traditional websites, 62% of small businesses said that social media didn't change their spending plans for the coming year. 27% said they are planning on increasing their spend due to social media.

But 9% plan on eliminating (4%) or spending less (5%) on their traditional website due to social media. While 9% sounds low, last June only 2% reported plans to spend less or eliminate their traditional website due to social media.

In the forecasting world, we call a 6 month shift of this magnitude a signal.

But despite the feedback, many small businesses are using Facebook for their firm's primary website. We're also seeing a growing number of new small businesses choosing Facebook over a traditional website for their web presence.

As our post earlier this week shows, the trend towards Facebook becoming an important web presence site for small businesses is clear.

What is unclear is how big this shift will be, and whether or not Facebook will fully replace traditional websites or simply augment them.

We don't think Facebook is going to fully replace traditional websites, at least not in the next 5 years.

But we do think over the next 5 years Facebook is going to become the primary web presence for roughly half of all small businesses that are online.

The chart also shows strong growth in the use of LinkedIn, with Twitter and blogs showing solid but less spectacular usage increases.

You may wonder why this survey shows lower social media usage than other surveys. The answer is survey methodology.

Most small business social media surveys use online surveys and don't attempt to create samples that statistically represent the entire small business sector. Instead, these surveys are trying to gauge usage of online small businesses or active online small businesses - not the entire sector.

This isn't wrong or bad, but can misleading if you're interested in the entire small business sector.

The State of Small Business survey uses phone interviews and samples in a manner that insures the survey respondents are representative of the entire U.S. small business sector. Because of this, their results are much more likely to accurately capture what is happening across a the entire small business segment of the U.S. economy.

We'll be posting on other interesting results from the Network Solutions 2010 State of Small Business report over the next few weeks.

March 07, 2011

It's popular these days to talk about a decline in U.S. innovation and competitiveness. Because of this, it's nice to see examples of U.S. companies winning.

John Dovorak's The U.S. Smartphone Revolution at PCMag.com describes the ascendancy of the U.S. smartphone industry, which he describes as "one of the great tech come-from-behind victories ever."

I agree. As Dvorak points out, it wasn't that long ago that the cell phone industry was often used as an example of the decline of America.

The shift to smartphones and mobile computing has changed this. Innovation U.S. companies are now clear leaders and according to Dvorak "... within just a few years the entire market will consist of varieties of smartphones, whose designs and operation were all invented in the U.S. and Canada."

Dvorak focused on the smartphone industry, but we think U.S. computing leadership is much more extensive. U.S. companies are leaders in all of the major next generation computing trends - mobile, social, cloud and analytics.

Each of these technology trends are important and powerful in their own right. But these trends and technologies are also converging and reinforcing one another, amplifying their impact and fundamentally changing how business is done.

Put more simply, work is moving to the cloud and innovative U.S. firms are leading the revolution.